Your Traffic Sources Have a Half-Life

I read this quote a few weeks ago. I don’t recall where it’s from, but it put into words a concept I’ve had in my head for ages but haven’t been able to communicate.

The concept centers around the idea that traffic sources decay over time. Some decay faster than others, but they all die out eventually if you don’t invest time to maintain them.

To understand the idea of traffic half-life, look at this Google Analytics screen shot from 6 weeks ago for traffic coming from Hacker News:

Notice the spike and the decay. Very rapid. I’ll also mention that even where it appears to have flatlined, around December 13th there are still around 65 visits per day, and by the 20th it’s down to about 16 per day.

Here’s a recent spike from Twitter:

You’ll notice the scale of the Y-axis is 4000 visits (versus 7000 above) so this would appear to provide fewer visitors. But in this case the decay of traffic by the 13th was only down to around 250, and it was still at 298 by December 20th.

And finally, here’s my organic search traffic during this same time period:

No spikes. No decay. Aside from the weekly trough on Saturday there is very little fluctuation month to month (what can I say, I guess reading Software by Rob is not everyone’s favorite Saturday night activity).

The Interesting PartIf the above three graphs were all plotted with the same scale on the Y-axis, the organic search traffic would barely peak out above the apparent “flatline” traffic you see in the Twitter graph.

So while at first glance it would appear the social media sources brought in way more traffic than organic search due to the mountainous peaks of their curves, the compounding nature of the consistent organic traffic actually brought in around 70% of each of the other two peaks.

Due to its tortoise-like consistency, organic search is always one of the strongest sources of traffic for this blog, even though the one-day totals of the social media spikes are 10-30x higher in any given month.

The other interesting thing to think about: If I stopped maintaining this blog today, the organic search traffic would literally take years (by my estimates) to drop to 50% of its current value (that’s the definition of a half-life).

For the Twitter and Hacker News traffic, their half-life is about 12 hours.

Traffic Half-lifesUsing this observation we can classify traffic sources into one of three groups:

This is not to say you can’t try advertising, but don’t count on it as a viable source of leads unless you have a chunk of change stashed away for this purpose. A very small percentage of startups have any hope of achieving a positive ROI with advertising (which you need if you’re bootstrapping).

Realization #2: Short half-life sources are the “sexy” onesThese are the ones batted around in the media. They’re “new,” “revolutionary” and “viral.” There are absolutely benefits to using them for certain events like a product launch or a big announcement.

But if your business relies on these sources to sustain itself you had better be an insanely talented buzz builder

And realize that these viral sources require a large amount of ongoing time and passion that most people cannot maintain in the long run. So instead of relying on them to drive sales directly, take advantage of your fleeting viral traffic by remembering the #1 goal of your website, and figuring out a way to turn short half-life traffic into long half-life traffic.

Realization #3: Long half-life sources are the holy grail of a long-term businessI’ve owned well over 30 software products and websites that have used every approach mentioned above (including advertising) as their marketing lifeblood. And one thing I can say unequivocally:

If you want to build a business that does not require a heavy, ongoing, constant investment in finding new customers…focus on long half-life traffic sources

This means learning SEO, and building email and RSS (and potentially Facebook) subscriber lists. This is where you build the equity that keeps your business around for years. Without it you are perpetually chasing your next prospect, which is an expensive proposition.

What’s interesting is that some companies appear to build their business around viral traffic sources (which have a short half-life), but they are, almost without us noticing, converting them into long half-life sources.

Large firms that come to mind are Groupon and Facebook. A smaller one many of us are familiar with is AppSumo.

What you’ll notice is these companies are using short half-life sources to drive traffic, but converting it into a source with a long half-life (an email list). This allows them to build a sustainable business over the long-term.

Facebook and Groupon, two of the most talked-about companies of the past year, are actually highly-optimized email marketing firms masquerading as viral marketing firms